Semiconductor makers have been struggling to find new ways to cool increasingly powerful chips. New chips generate more waste heat because of the increasing numbers of circuits being packed into the chips. As circuit dimensions shrink into the nanometer realm, waste heat becomes a significant problem. Increasing power densities, even with smaller switching potentials, causes the chips to warm to unacceptable temperatures. This condition has lead to ever increasing space consumed by packaging schemes for heat transfer away from the chip-level electronics.
Heat sink and fan assemblies are large, which makes them less useful as the microelectronics industry moves towards thinner and smaller devices. For instance, while heat sink or fan assemblies are widely used in desktops, laptops cannot accommodate these components. Another disadvantage of these assemblies is their low convective heat transfer coefficients due to room temperature air acting as the cooling fluid. Air has low density, low thermal conductivity, and low specific heat, resulting in low heat load carrying capacity. The average convective heat transfer coefficient of forced air convection is typically in the range of 10-200 W/m2K. In contrast, the use of two-phase liquid cooling allows for heat transfer coefficients ranging from 10,000-100,000 W/m2K.
Liquid cooling was first used in the 1960's to remove heat from bipolar junction transistor (BJT)-based processors when air-cooling did not perform adequately. The introduction of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology in the early 1990's reduced the necessity of liquid cooling because the material produces less excess heat. Due to the increased number of feature on CMOS-based processors, liquid cooling is becoming useful again. In April 2005, IBM introduced a water-cooled heat exchanger mounted to the back cover of a 19-inch server rack. The processors are cooled using a cooling distribution unit to supply the water, and the heat load is dissipated to the building's chilled water line. While not cutting edge technology, the use of this method signals the coming of a wide spread industry acceptance of liquid cooling solutions.
An increasingly common liquid cooling device, the heat pipe, is used extensively in cooling applications. Micro-heat pipes use small ducts filled with a working fluid to transfer heat from high temperature devices to a remote heat sink. A typical heat pipe for semiconductor devices is a circular metal tube that has its interior wall coated with a wick structure. Evaporation and condensation of the fluid transfers heat through the duct. As heat from a device is applied, the fluid in the wick of the evaporator section of the device vaporizes, removing latent heat. The vapor travels through the channel to the cooled condenser region of the structure, where the latent heat is released by condensation of the vapor. The condensed vapor moves back to the evaporator region along the wick structure by capillary force along the interior wall of the heat pipe. Heat pipes are limited because they are mostly cylindrical, have vapor and liquid moving counter to one another in the same channel, and often cannot dissipate heat fluxes greater than 10 W/cm2.
Recently, loop heat pipes (LHPs) have been utilized to remove heat from high density electronics and have been employed by the aerospace industry as well. FIG. 1A shows a schematic representation of a conventional LHP. In traditional devices, the cooling package or “evaporation pump” 1 is normally a simple cylindrical metallic heat pipe, filled with a porous ceramic metallic oxide (sintered) that serves as the wick for the working fluid. When heat 2 is externally applied, the working fluid is evaporated from the wick surface. The vapor enters surface grooves extruded or cast on the wick surface, which direct the vapor into the vapor line 3. The vapor travels to the condenser 4, where the latent heat 5 is extracted typically by cooling air, cooling liquid, or radiation to space. The condensed liquid returns to the reservoir 6 by virtue of the vapor pressure head in the lower line 8. The porous wick returns the working fluid through random pores by capillary action back to the hot surface to begin the process anew. In a similar device called a capillary pumped loop (CPL) heat pipe (FIG. 1B), the reservoir 6 is a separate ballast which may work by gravity or other forced feed 7.
On or about May 22, 2003, Ahmed Shuja submitted a masters thesis to the University of Cincinnati entitled “Development of a Micro Loop Heat Pipe, A Novel MEMS System Based On The CPS Technology.” This masters thesis, as well as all of the references cited therein, are incorporated by reference into this application as if fully set forth herein.
On Dec. 22, 2005, US utility patent application Ser. No. 10/872,575 (filed Jun. 18, 2004) was published as Pub. No. 20050280128. The title of the publication is “Thermal Interposer For Thermal Management Of Semiconductor Devices.” The content of this publication is incorporated by reference into this patent application as if fully set forth herein.
On Sep. 26, 2002, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/026,365 (filed Dec. 18, 2001) was published as Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0135980. The publication is entitled “High Heat Flux Electronic Cooling Apparatus, Devices and System Incorporating The Same.” The content of this publication is incorporated by reference into this application as if fully set forth herein.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,804,117 entitled “Thermal Bus for Electronics Systems” issued on Oct. 12, 2004. The content of this patent is incorporated by reference into this application as if fully set forth herein.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,972,955 entitled “Electro-Fluidic Device And Interconnect And Related Methods” issued on Dec. 6, 2005. The application that resulted in this patent was filed on Sep. 25, 2003. The content of this patent is incorporated by reference into this application as if fully set forth herein.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/124,365 (filed May 6, 2005) was published on Apr. 6, 1006 as Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0076046. The publication is entitled “Thermoelectric Device Structure And Apparatus Incorporation The Same.” The content of this patent is incorporated by reference into this application as if fully set forth herein.
Semiconductor makers have been struggling to find new ways to cool their increasingly powerful chips. For example, Intel recently cancelled its 4-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor because of increasing heat dissipation problems. Intel has resorted to investigating dual core technologies which reduce waste heat by lower power consumption. However, the consortium between IBM, Toshiba, and Sony plans to use a 16 core processor in forthcoming products that will push the limits of processing power and waste heat mediation. While waste heat has been a industry-wide problem, cooling solutions will be of utmost importance as circuit dimensions shrink into the nanometer realm causing chips consume more power and give off more heat. The invention herein provides a solution to this and similar cooling problems.